The 8-Bit City

Brooklyn-based interaction designer Brett Camper did some great work with these pretty 8-Bit city maps. The maps are designed with 1980s video games in mind. Oh yes, among the series is a map from Amsterdam, which is featured above. (Scroll down for New York.) Other cities are Austin, Berlin, Detroit, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC. More cities are coming soon…

“What if you could run through the city and capture all buildings? What if you could take over the buildings of your opponent to expand your territory?” A group of students from the Hochschule der Künste in Zürich, Switzerland, took twelve days to develop an exciting hyper-local location-aware game entitled Urban Defender. Inspired by gangs…

We all know Augmented Reality (AR) is the next big thing. Enhanced by the iPhone’s 3.0 OS and the iPhone 3GS, AR startups, such as Layar and Tonchidot, pop up like mushrooms these days. British developer Acrossair came up with another great iPhone application that superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, called Nearest Tube.

The collective interest in data and diagrams of data seems to have grown enormously over the last years. The world of infographics and data porn tends to become a trendy new subculture led by blogs such as Fuck Yeah Cartography, Information Aesthetics, and Information Is Beautiful. This whole new focus on data and information seems…